A new
method for image compression is introduced. It uses a new physics-based
mathematical transformation that increases spatial coherency by causing
feature-selective stretch. We show that by reshaping the image with a special
class of transfer functions, more samples are allocated to sharp features,
where they are needed, and less to coarse features, where
they are redundant. The method achieves image space-bandwidth compression
without feature detection or prior knowledge of the
image.